On day five of this horrific crisis — but only three days after this picture was taken — Bush holds a press conference.

While people at the Convention Center are STILL DYING, Bush praises the
head of FEMA who didn’t know this time yesterday that people were even
there.  "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."

Yesterday, on Good Morning America, Bush pretended that everything that could possibly be done was being done.

That didn’t stick long.

So the pose for today is the exact opposite: outrage.

"The results are not acceptable," he says.

I have to say I agree.

President Bush, this morning, on Good Morning America:

    "I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

Read the links (some lifted from Dan Froomkin’s fine Washington Post piece):

And as this earlier post pointed out, and which bears repeating until there is some accountability:

Money for the levees was slashed by the Bush administration, over the
repeated screams of New Orleans safety officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to help pay for the invasion of Iraq.

UPDATE: Crooks And Liars has the video of Bush claiming no one saw this coming.

Compare with, in a final example, Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill, believe it or not, proving otherwise in a must-see spot recorded for a Louisiana save-the-wetlands campaign in 2004.  (Warning: watching this, which must have been darkly funny in 2004 and doubtless will be again in another 50 years, made me physically shake with sadness and anger.)

MSNBC right now.

Showing a 15-second clip of people looting a Wal-Mart.  Running the clip over and over and over.

Outrage from host Rita Cosby and her two guests, who are going on and on about the need to apprehend, crack down, and punish these people, all of whom clearly live in the devastated area and who are making off with $14 pairs of pants.

Meanwhile, people in New Orleans are f*cking DYING.

I guess it’s too bad for them they don’t look more like Natalee Holloway.

UPDATE: I’ve seen more and similar footage.  I’m sure there are people grabbing TVs somewhere, although in a flooded wasteland with no electricity, this would be a strange move indeed.  But mostly I’m seeing people with armloads of clothes and sacks of food.

You want looting?  Try Halliburton.  Try $9 billion in Iraq funds missing.

Not enough, "news" people?  Try last year’s shifting of New Orleans’ disaster prep funding to Bush’s war in Iraq.

It’s just too bad none of these came with footage of poor black people we’re supposed to be outraged at.

Lake New Orleans is rising.

Now that the mayor of New Orleans is describing bodies floating in the water in such number that rescue workers are merely pushing them aside, yes, now we see news reports of a president willing to cut his vacation — the longest in presidential history — two days short.

But this was the U.S. president, this morning, during what is likely the GREATEST NATURAL DISASTER IN AMERICAN HISTORY:

Here’s what was happening at that exact moment, not far away:

Was this a moment unfairly captured?  No.  Experts had forecast an imminent possible disaster days ago.  And from the start, other elected officials — Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, for example — began urgently working to save American lives.  Bush chose instead to continue making public speeches before hand-picked audiences pushing his political agenda for Medicare and trying to spin his unpopular war in Iraq.

And here’s the U.S. president, yesterday — while the disaster was unfolding, the morning after the storm hit, days after experts had forecast the LIKELY DESTRUCTION OF AN ENTIRE AMERICAN CITY:

Nero.

I can think of no other apt comparison.

UPDATE: Does the Bush administration’s cutting of funds to maintain New Orleans’ levees as part of their war effort mean that New Orleans is now a casualty of the Iraq war?

If you’re entering the site here, go to the main blog page, read the link, and decide for yourself.

This simple model is actually pretty interesting, and reflected the changing storm’s path away from New Orleans almost instantly.

Still, you always get statistical quirks.

Projected damage to the entire state of Georgia, as of 2:30 pm eastern time: $9.03.